


The Lie

by hailtherandom



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Ambiguously Happy Ending, Angst, Feels, Gen, Post Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-23
Updated: 2013-06-23
Packaged: 2017-12-15 20:47:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/853889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hailtherandom/pseuds/hailtherandom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John finds out that Sherlock faked his death before he returns. He decides to give the detective a taste of his own medicine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Lie

**Author's Note:**

> Written for this gifset on tumblr ages ago, just getting around to posting it now.  
> (http://doomslock.tumblr.com/post/31935251459)

His heart stops when he hears the crack against the pavement.

The sickening, stomach-wrenching crack that spells the extinguishment of life in the eyes of Sherlock Holmes.

The crack that signifies the end, that brings forth the blood that paints the pavement dark red and taunts John as it slicks through Sherlock's hair.

_It's over. He's not coming back._

*

He believes it. 

For years.

For years, John wanders the streets of London, lost in the familiar streets that are now grey and faded and washed out, washed out like the old Sun headlines proclaiming Sherlock's death that he keeps locked in his desk drawer. He's too masochistic, and too stubborn to throw them away, and perhaps too hopeful - if he could just hold onto the tiny hope that Sherlock wasn't a fraud, never really told those lies and killed those people… _Well_.

Maybe he wouldn't have to turn to the only black and white thing in his life, locked in his other desk drawer under his laptop. 

With the black of gunmetal and the white of another kind of sick, twisted hope.

*

Two years and nine months.

Six hundred thirty-nine days.

Sherlock Holmes comes back from the dead.

He returns to life, full-color vibrant brilliant life, in the form of a quiet word and a few sheets of photograph paper from Mycroft in the back of a car that Anthea is driving for once. Pictures dated less than three weeks from the present, that clearly depict the man that John once knew as Sherlock Holmes, ragged and destitute, thin to the point of worry and scarred, but very much alive. 

Mycroft drops John off at his flat share and the world goes hazy until John comes to with a fist full of wooden splinters and bruises and a very dented wall, and an idea that makes the white twisted hope shining in the reflection of his gun all the sicker.

*

Sherlock is on stakeout again, contorted uncomfortably on a fire escape stairwell when he feels his mobile vibrate in his pocket. It's disconcerting on its own - he has a web to destroy, and the final threads will not be cut by his being distracted - but only Mycroft and Molly know his mobile number and neither call unless there's an emergency or he needs help. And he hadn't called either before…

He waits until the thread in question - a marksman, most likely, probably of no particularly high ranking under Moriarty, but smart enough to evade capture for so long - is neutralized, then slips his mobile out of his pocket.

 

_From: Mycroft Holmes_

_16:33:49_

_Important news regarding John. Come at once to the Diogenes Club._

 

Sherlock frowns, but slips his mobile into his pockets and stands up, stretching his stiff, sore limbs. The Diogenes Club is all the way across town, but Mycroft never has news about John, and any scraps of information he receives about his former flatmate all come through texts and hushed calls. Never in almost three years of running has Mycroft called him in to talk about John.

Sherlock hails the next cab he sees and makes it across London in a little over an hour.

*

He feels numb.

He knows no other way to describe it.

He knows the pain of loss, of detox and withdrawal, of watching John's broken, empty expression as his body is carted away into the morgue at Barts. 

But he does not know how to deal with this.

Mycroft slides a file across his desk and Sherlock snatches at it, flipping it open and finding exactly what he expects. 

The morgue reports are as accurate as they could be, and they're everything that he's seen before. He doesn't look at the small picture; he doesn't think he would be able to stand looking at John's pale, lifeless corpse with an annoyingly symbolic halo of red splattered around it. He doesn't recognize the morgue attendant's signature - male, mid-forties, left handed, slight tremor, probably due to anxiety, most likely social anxiety, he and Molly must get along well - but he understands the rest of it perfectly.

"This was filed three days ago," says Mycroft, and Sherlock could quip that the date on the file says as much, but all he can do is nod mutely. "By the morgue attendant that they assigned to assist Miss Hooper several years ago. Undoubtedly you've sent some of his cases down to St. Bart's, in the process of unraveling James Moriarty's web."

Sherlock nods dumbly, eyes flickering over John's height and weight and birthday and time of death - it hurts in a way he did not expect, to see those dates written down in ink, unerasable.

"It is suspected that he was in a great deal of psychological pain following your apparent death," Mycroft continues. "I received reports, as you know, that his psychosomatic limp returned in full several months after the incident at St. Bart's, and purportedly worsened after that. As you know, he kept up a living working at the surgery, thought it did not occupy much of his time. We did not realize that things has worsened up to the point that… Well. We were unaware of the matter until we got a call from St. Bart's."

Sherlock looks up. "You got the call?"

Mycroft looks at him appraisingly. "He never did remove you as his emergency contact, Sherlock."

Sherlock looks down at the carpet, swallowing hard. "Are you sure?" he asks hollowly. One last hope. One last black and white hope, the truth or a lie, some falsity that he can cling to as he divorces himself from reality.

"I'm sorry, Sherlock," says Mycroft, with an unusual air of gentleness. "He's gone."

The white of false hope burning inside Sherlock extinguishes, and he breathes out the invisible backness of what he can only call despair.

*

It takes another three months for Sherlock to tear down the final strands of Moriarty's web. He abandons the assistance of his homeless network and starts taking up the guns and the knives and the poison and the garrotes, sometimes literally ripping the strands apart. His final battle is against a sniper, an excellent sniper and one who he cannot be sure he will walk away from. In the battle of wits, he bests the man easily, gets away with a bullet graze that barely a few stitches while the sniper - John's sniper, he learns - lies still on the floor, oozing blood from the knife wound in his throat and staring blankly at him as he leaves.

*

Mycroft agrees to collect him - Sherlock sneers at the word 'collect' but he has little choice but to agree at this point - and assist him in escaping England again. Last time, his journey was perilous, and he was barely able to evade his own capture a few times, concealed in trains through Europe and cargo ships sailing around in eastern Asia. Mycroft promises much more protection, for wherever he wishes or needs to go.

And he does wish to go. There is no reason to stay.

Mycroft stealthily sends a text on his mobile and readily agrees.

*

Sherlock steps out of the car into the dull grey light of London in the morning. This afternoon, Mycroft's people will take him to Heathrow and put him on a plane to Germany, but he has several hours before they need to leave, and he can think of no other way to spend his time. Not now.

The walls of Bart's have taken a beating since he last saw them, staring up at them blankly through wide, unblinking eyes. Bits of graffiti and paint chips adorn the walls, and Sherlock even sees his own name a few times, scrawled in sharpie and half painted over. The spot where the released the fake blood has long since been cleaned; in fact, there's no evidence at all that two men purportedly lost their lives here, apart from some mangled, spray-painted declarations. 

He steps back, nearly tripping over himself as he pulls away from the curb and back, back, back to where he remembers John standing. Where he watched as he shattered John's heart from forty feet up. Where he can still hear John screaming his name as he tossed his phone to the side and stepped off the ledge.

"Three years ago, was it?" a voice asks quietly.

Sherlock whirls around and nearly falls back onto the pavement.

John is standing a few feet behind him, hands folded in front of him, cradling his cane in one hand looking up at the roof where they both remember Sherlock stood and made his last, dying, lying declarations.

"You…"

"This is a turn-up," said John. "Isn't it, Sherlock?"

Sherlock just stares at him. "John…?"

"Sherlock," said John, projecting every air of calm, though Sherlock can tell by the faint shaking of his arms that he is anything but. 

"You know?"

"I know."

Sherlock looks John up and down, hardly able to take in any details of the man. He notices the tightening in John's shoulders, the new lines in his face, the way he shifts his weight from leg to leg and the psychosomatic limp struggles to take over. "Why did you…? How?"

John, still looking up at the rooftop, smiles, though it doesn't reach anywhere but his mouth and barely even there. "You aren't the only one who can fake medical records, Sherlock," he says quietly, almost too quiet for Sherlock to hear. "Records are only as good as the people who keep them, remember?"

Sherlock can do little but blink as he stares at the man, John Watson, _his_ John, the man he presumed dead, smiling coldly at the place where their lives as they knew them shattered three years ago. He reaches out to touch John, to ascertain that he is real and not some sort of fevered hallucination from a fever he picked up back in India, but John is solid, an unmovable mass, and the slightest shifts in his posture let Sherlock know under no uncertain terms that he is not to try.

"John," he breathes out, like a prayer, like some holy name that neither of them believe in anymore. "John… Why?"

John grips his cane a little bit tighter in his hand, leaning on it a little. "I could ask you the same."

Sherlock's eyes darken, and he reached out to grip John by the shoulders again. John shoots him a hard look, and Sherlock knows he should let go, but he can't bring himself to let go again.

"Why the hell would you do something like this, John?" he demands? "I did what I had to do to protect you, do you understand that? I left our life together and everything I knew in order to save your life!" He's shouting now, he recognizes dimly, but there's no one around to chastise or stare, and John looks very much unaffected. "What would you possibly have to gain by doing this-" Sherlock's voice breaks off, and he clears his throat, blinking hard a few times, before almost inaudibly adding, "to me."

John regards him sadly. "I wanted you to know what it was like."

Sherlock's breath catches in his chest. "What?"

John sighs and looks down at the ground. "Without you… I was lost. I lost everything when you fell, Sherlock. I lost my lifestyle, I lost my work, I lost my flatmate…" He looks up, almost apologetic. "And I lost my best friend. And it damn near killed me a second time around."

Sherlock bites his lip and swallows hard. "John…"

John holds one hand up and Sherlock immediately falls silent. "No. You asked, now you get to know. I lost everything, Sherlock, and it took me ages to move forward to a point where I could walk through the streets of London without seeing your name plastered across the walls and your coat turning onto the next street out of the corner of my eye. It took me _years_ to move past it all. And then Mycroft comes to me and tells me you aren't actually dead? That the last two and a half years of my life have all been a lie? How did you think I would feel?"

Sherlock stands up stiffly. "Mycroft wasn't supposed to tell-"

"I don't care what Mycroft wasn't supposed to tell me," John says, and his voice is barely elevated but Sherlock falls silent nonetheless. "I don't care what anyone was or wasn't supposed to tell me. You could have told me, Sherlock, at any point in those two and a half years, that you were still alive. And you didn't."

Sherlock stares for a second, picking his words carefully. "It wouldn't have been safe for you to know, John."

John snorts and rolls his eyes. "It wasn't ever safe, Sherlock. Not once was the world ever safe. Never. And any danger I was in from knowing that you were still alive? Do you really think that it would have outweighed not having to have lost you anymore?"

Sherlock shakes his head, trying to clear it. "I don't understand, John. I don't. Why would you do this to me?"

"Because if you had as little of a heart as you like to pretend, you would have been able to carry on," says John. "If you were half as unemotional as you want people to think, maybe even as unemotional as you want to _be_ , you would have seen my death, perhaps mourned for a little while, and then moved on. But you have a heart, Sherlock. I know you do. I've seen it. And I wanted you to know what losing you felt like."

Sherlock opens his mouth, then closes it again for a long while. Finally he looks up, searches out John's eyes, and says, "it hurt."

John nods. "It did. And it does. And I'm glad you know that now." He rests his hand on Sherlock's forearm for a moment, then lets go and turns to walk away.

"Where are you going?" Sherlock calls after him, breaking into a trot behind him.

"You've got a plane to catch," says John, not turning around. "And you might still want to catch it. It's up to you, Sherlock."

Sherlock freezes, watches John's silhouette recede into the distance, then pulls out his mobile and dials one of the two numbers in his phone.

"Mycroft? I'm going to need you to cancel that flight."


End file.
